New center harnesses campus expertise to develop screening technologies
September 20, 2007
School of Public Health professors are teaming up with researchers across the UC Berkeley campus to create the Center for Exposure Biology, a new research collaboration that will focus on developing biomarkers and biosensors to allow cost-effective testing for blood cancer risks. Stephen Rappaport, adjunct professor of environmental health sciences, will direct the program and will lead one of its three interdisciplinary projects.
“The ability to characterize the health risks of environmental contaminants, and to understand the influence of genetic variability on these risks, is limited now because tests are difficult to perform and costly,” says Rappaport. “What we’re trying to do is develop technology that will allow a large number of subjects to be tested and screened quickly and inexpensively.”
The center is being established with funds from a $4.7 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) announced on September 4, 2007. The grant is part of the Exposure Biology Program of the Genes, Environment, and Health Initiative at the National Institutes of Health, a program which seeks to develop innovative technologies to better understand the interplay of environmental exposure to contaminants and genetic variations on human disease.
Rappaport is looking forward to collaborating with researchers from UC Berkeley’s Colleges of Chemistry and Engineering. “Our school has a health mandate that is fueled by biomedical research,” he says, “With this new center, we are harnessing the wealth of scientific and technical expertise that is available at Berkeley to help solve public health problems.”
Center members are getting ready to begin work on three major interdisciplinary projects, starting in October. Along with Rappaport, Professor of Biostatisics Mark van der Laan and College of Chemistry Professor Evan Williams will contribute to a project focusing on the use of protein adducts—compounds formed by reactions between blood proteins and chemical carcinogens—to identify initiators of human lymphomas.
“Although carcinogens are too reactive to measure directly in the blood, it is possible to measure their reaction products (adducts) with blood proteins, such as hemoglobin or albumin. The levels of these adducts in the blood can be used to estimate the doses of carcinogens people received from their environment,” Rappaport says. “We will be able to compare the adducts in people who have cancer to those who don’t. If there are differences, we can get information about particular carcinogens that cause certain cancers.”
Two environmental health sciences professors, Martyn Smith and Luoping Zhang, are contributing to a project led by Richard Mathies, a professor from the College of Chemistry. This project will blend the extensive experience of Smith and Zhang in seeking the causes of leukemia with Mathis’ expertise in developing “Lab-on-a-Chip Microsystems.” Together they will work to develop technology for genetic analysis on single cells to identify biomarkers for early signs of leukemia and lymphoma. If successful, it will be the first time that PCR, a common method for DNA analysis, is performed on single cells in the presence of a huge background of normal cells.
A final project to develop portable biosensors will be led by Professor Bernhard Boser, from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, with contributions from Mathis and Rappaport. The biosensors will reduce immunoassays to a microscale level, making biomarker measurements practical for large epidemiology studies using single drops of blood from finger lancets. Boser believes this technology could be particularly useful in remote locations, for over-the-counter tests, or during major emergencies.
Much of the research being done by the center will have immediate practical applications. For example, Rappaport has already been in contact with Patricia Buffler, professor of epidemiology, dean emerita, and Kenneth Howard Kaiser & Marjorie Witherspoon Kaiser Endowed Chair, who is doing research on the causes of childhood leukemia. The center’s development of portable biosensors could prove invaluable to Buffler’s work by measuring protein adducts of carcinogens in dried blood spots, which are collected at birth from infants in California and then stored by the California Department of Public Health. Levels of protein adducts in dried blood spots could be related to in utero exposures that the infants received prior to birth.
It is anticipated that six or seven graduate students, from the School of Public Health as well as the other colleges, will also work in the Center for Exposure Biology. By training these graduate students, the center will ensure that a new generation of scientists will continue in this groundbreaking research.
